DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Note: These discussion questions contain spoilers! We suggest you finish the book before you read through them. 1. Cecily Wong gives three definitions of the word kaleidoscope at the beginning of the novel. Discuss how the ideas of these definitions appear throughout the book. 2. Early in the book, Riley says, “Here we were in New York, molting our skins, shedding ourselves of who we were back in Oregon. Morgan’s sister. Yearbook James.” Do Riley and James ever truly escape their old identities? How so? Or why not? 3. Riley struggles with living in Morgan’s shadow throughout the entire novel. How does her trip help her develop her self-knowledge and put herself at the forefront of her own life? 4. Karen says to Riley, “Your sister was the glue, you know that.” In response, Riley wonders what her mom considers her to be. What’s Riley’s relationship like with her mother? How does their relationship change throughout the book, especially after Riley returns to New York City after everything that happens? 5. James tells Riley that he loves her during an intense argument. He convinces her that he’s telling the truth after she doubts him. Discuss instances throughout the book where the readers see Riley from the perspective of James. How does seeing her through James’s eyes alter our perception of her? 6. Riley discovers that even seemingly perfect Morgan had demons, too, after her realization in India. After putting her sister on a pedestal for so long, how does Riley’s discovery shift her understanding of Morgan? How does it affect how she feels about herself? About her parents? 7. The Brightons transform as they move through different phases of their lives. However, they maintain some of their old patterns, too. What are some examples that showcase how the Brightons still hold on to certain behaviors from their past as they move into their futures? 8. Discuss how the author weaves in the themes of cultural commodification and the ongoing legacy of colonialism throughout the book. 9. Throughout the book, Riley is searching for a place for herself, both within her family and out in the world. Do you think she ultimately finds the answers she was looking for?
e a t h e r H a w k s fo r d
CECILY WONG
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Q&A WITH
You’ve mentioned that you wrote this story as an exploration of what we owe our families. Have your views shifted from before you started the novel and now that you’ve finished writing it? We often feel pressure to be the person our families want us to be. We all inherit narratives about ourselves, usually before we can decide for ourselves who we are, or who we want to be. In writing Kaleidoscope, I wanted to explore what it looks like to rewrite these inherited narratives. I think many of us struggle with how to be the person our families think we are, which is not the person we feel we are. Our families are often the people who know us the best and understand us the least, and I find this dynamic fascinating, maddening, and universal. What we owe our families is an unanswerable question. But as a baseline, or as a thesis, I believe we should give them as much love and compassion as we can manage, without sacrificing ourselves.
Kaleidoscope focuses on the relationship between two sisters, who are very different. Could you talk about how you came up with their characters, and how they evolved in the writing of the novel? The relationship between Morgan and Riley contains almost everything I know about friendship and sisterhood. Each sister contains a bit of me—Riley’s headstrong independence and disparaging humor, Morgan’s chattiness and desire to please—and yet they also contain big chunks of my friends. I have a friend who turns every decision into a spreadsheet, which Riley does. I have another friend who never comes over without a present, that’s Morgan. I had great fun sorting through the quirky traits of the women I love and building these two sisters who make unlikely friends, but are devoted to one another. I also have a sister, and we’re quite different, but we are bonded in the unique way of being raised by the same people, of growing up in the same house, which gives us this lexicon of shared experience that will never go away, no matter how we change. Siblings are fascinating to me because they are rarely the people we would choose for our friends, and yet they are often our closest allies, the people who will come to our rescue first. And yet it can be difficult to grow into yourself around a sibling, who holds memories of you that are old and embarrassing. I wanted Morgan and Riley to embody this bond. They are wildly different. They both enable and stunt the other’s growth. And they love each other fiercely. Your travels through Asia and Europe informed some of the themes of this novel, including privilege and consumerism. How did the idea of having the Brightons be the purveyor of these international goods come to you? In 2014, my husband and I took a nine-month backpacking trip, mostly through Asia and Europe, which remains one of the greatest experiences of my life. Everything felt new and astonishing, including this endless array of shopping we encountered across the globe.
Everywhere we went there were outdoor markets and bazaars and malls selling local goods and clothing and handicrafts. There was so much I wanted to buy, but I couldn’t because of the length and budget of our trip, and so I invented a store in my mind, called Kaleidoscope, and I began to shop for this imaginary store as we traveled. At a certain point, the store became a fixture in the novel I was writing, and I started thinking about it more critically. What did it mean to source items from around the world and package them for an American audience? What did this kind of consumeristic travel and cultural commodification do to a person? I began to examine the privilege, and the absurdities both big and small, that accompany becoming an American spokesperson for global fashion and taste. I wanted Kaleidoscope to be a store that was glamorous and appealing—to this day, I think I would own a piece from Kaleidoscope—in order to make these questions more complicated. I’m an avid traveler and my home is filled with things I’ve collected from my trips, and I wanted to probe at what it means to be a good traveler and a conscientious consumer, and the world of gray that is inherent in both these terms.
“I wanted to probe at what it means to be a good traveler and a conscientious consumer, and the world of gray that is inherent in both these terms.”
The Brightons are a biracial Chinese American family. Can you talk a bit about why and how you chose the family’s origins?
I am Chinese American, but my family has lived in Hawaii for three generations. I have the kind of physical appearance that makes people guess where I’m from, and throughout my life, the guesses have been vast, varied, and generally wrong. As an Asian-looking person, I am regularly regarded by non-Asian people as a representative, or else an expert, of Asian culture—not just my own, but also cultures to which I do not belong. In Kaleidoscope, I wanted to play with the absurdities of how physical traits translate to cultural authority. The Brightons are half-Chinese, half-Caucasian, and they become celebrated spokespeople for their international goods and global taste. It doesn’t matter that the Brightons are package-tour travelers, or that their store sells mostly goods from places they are not from, because they look the part. Their ethnic ambiguity, their interracial family, it grants them the authority to embody the appearance, the feeling, of multiculturalism. This is not to say that the Brightons have nothing to offer in this space, or that I cannot speak to the Asian American experience, but to show how easy it is for specificity of ethnicity and culture to be flattened into something digestible—and how our society appoints, sometimes arbitrarily, who should speak for these massive categories. One of the great joys of reading your book was the idea that relationships are not always what they seem. As bonds develop and change, we are witness to amazing character development. What did it take for yours to be created and fleshed out? Kaleidoscope took me five years to finish, and it took me nearly that long for my characters to fully reveal themselves to me. Each character gave me unique difficulty. Morgan was maddeningly perfect. Riley was stubborn, and she had a tendency to shut people out. James was wrestling with his ambition and insecurity, as was Karen, and Hank was scared of his wife. I wrote Kaleidoscope in chronological order, without knowing how it would end, which gave me the opportunity to make decisions in real time, as I gathered new information. As I wrote, I made it my goal to push my characters into the situations they least wanted
to confront. Kaleidoscope is a story with just a handful of characters, and for me, one of the greatest satisfactions of reading a small-cast novel is to feel the nuance and intimacy of their relationships. It was important to me that I not gloss over any difficult moments; I felt it was my job to create the space and circumstance for them to say all the messy, difficult things they were afraid of saying. And I found that what they were keeping from me was exactly what they were keeping from one another. That’s one of the best parts about writing novels; at a certain point, the characters become so real they take you by surprise.
THE PLAYLIST Music plays an essential role in Kaleidoscope, and there were songs I listened to over and over while writing, which helped me set the mood. One of Riley’s great pleasures is putting in a set of earbuds and letting her day unfold to a soundtrack. It’s one of my great pleasures, too, and I loved making this Kaleidoscope playlist, which is filled with songs that helped this book find its momentum and groove.
1. DOO WOP (THAT THING) by Lauryn Hill 2. RICH GIRL by Hall & Oates 3. CAMPUS by Vampire Weekend 4. HOLOCENE by Bon Iver 5. EVERYWHERE by Fleetwood Mac 6. READ MY MIND by The Killers 7. JUST BREATHE by Pearl Jam 8. INDIAN SUMMER by Jai Wolf 9. LOVE GENERATION by Bob Sinclar, Gary Pine 10. JUBEL by Klingande 11. MUNDIAN TO BACH KE by Panjabi MC 12. WALKING ON A DREAM by Empire of the Sun 13. VE MAAHI by Arijit Singh, Asees Kaur 14. LOST IN SPACE by Emmit Fenn 15. FEEL THE TIDE by Mumford & Sons
SCAN TO LISTEN TO THE FULL PLAYLIST!
The Bodega Bacon Egg and Cheese is a quintessential New York City sandwich, and for me, it encapsulates a kind of youthful, ambitious hunger.
The kaya jam is a girlhood memory shared between Riley and Morgan, and like all good food, it becomes much more significant than the sum of its ingredients.